


Blood in The Water (Let Me Live)

by TauntingTyrant



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Abuse, Angst, Character Death, Child Abuse, Gen, Origin Story, Poverty, Pre-Canon, Reno-centric, So far: No pairings, The OCs are the side characters, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-30
Updated: 2018-06-30
Packaged: 2019-05-31 11:23:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15118343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TauntingTyrant/pseuds/TauntingTyrant
Summary: Everyone's got a place they come from. Reno is no different.Here is a collection of the moments that count.





	Blood in The Water (Let Me Live)

**Author's Note:**

> Remember that trend in FFVII fic where everybody was trying to write origin stories for Reno?  
> Guess what, THROWBACK! Because this is exactly what that is, and I'm not pretending it won't be the tiniest bit cliche, but I digress. If what you're looking for is the headcanon that Reno's got Wutainese in him (based on some old fandom theories) and that he's a scrappy kid from the slums, you are getting just that. So sit back and enjoy the ride.

**1.**

**1982**

There is nothing but the sound of gentle waves to guide the silence of the night, soon broken by the sounds of the water’s disturbance. A small boat sailed across the seas, filled with two occupants. One of them stared out into the ocean, taking in the nothingness that stretched for miles. It was clear to him that they had a long way to go, a very long way.

The other occupant was a woman cradling something within her arms. Even after days at sea, her anxiety had yet to calm. She muttered to herself faintly in Wutai, bouncing the little bundle in her arms as she repeated the words like a mantra.

_What are we going to do? How are we going to keep you safe?_

The man had long since given up discouraging her words, all the anger within him drained. He couldn’t bear to curse her any longer. If they were to keep their lives, this was what had to be done. With what little possessions they had, they fled, never to return.

Hopefully their sudden departure would bring better opportunities and less debts to pay.

The couple reached the mainland after a long journey. By some stroke of luck they made it to their true destination; Midgar.

In a city so large, it would be a very long time before anyone who truly wanted to look for them could even dream of following the trail. Everything that happened under the plate was off the record. The Sector 7 Slums was a wonderful fit. In a world of the abandoned and forgotten, they too would slip into such a role. Their names meant nothing, nor did the baby in their arms. It didn’t matter that the only language they’d ever known with any real fluency was the one of their motherland. The only language of Midgar was money, and that was what got them into this situation in the first place.

The woman looked to their new home, turning to her husband with a frown.

 _“We never gave him a name.”_ Her eyes shift to the cooing baby in her arms. Her husband finds himself focusing on the tint of her eyes, drawn to the shade. Perhaps the mix of aquamarine and electric blue in her eyes had been what charmed him when he took her as a wife. She wasn’t like other girls in the land. A sea of brown and maroon in their eyes.

 _No_ , her eyes **were** the sea. Bright and dark all at once if you bothered to really looked.

Before now, he hadn’t bothered to look at what color their child’s eyes were.

He had her eyes. A blessing and a curse all at once. It meant the mixing of the races, it meant a failure of his genetics to overpower an impurity. Whispers of who that strange boy with the appearance of two worlds was would float around. For an irregularity so small, it would be a big mistake.  
  
It also meant that their child would always have the beauty of his mother.

He would tolerate this. Letting out a noncommittal grunt, he muttered a response back in their mother tongue. It would be one of the last times he’d use it. They were in the West now, it was time to do as they did, to talk as they would.

“Yǐ.”

 _“Jūn Yǐ…”_ She whispers like a prayer, raven hair pushed by the winds.

That would do.  
  


**2.**

**1988**

They couldn’t afford to send him to school (In this place, who could?). Despite the fact the so-called institution was a few bad days from being another shanty on the side of the dirt paths. So his lessons took place at home, suffering to be best teacher of his lessons.

Yī found himself bored often, not too thrilled at the prospect of having his nose in the books from dusk to dawn. It wasn’t like he was adept at anything outside of history and mathematics. But father always hovered when he got the bright idea to sneak out and play with the children outside the old windows of their small home. The bruises he hid under shirts that were already too big for him acted a deterrent to the fantasies of rushing past Bàba’s watchful gaze and into the streets. He shook his head, hand instinctively reaching up to run through his hair, only to be yanked down and onto the cover of the book. Dark eyes stared into his own, daring him to make such an unclean gesture again.

 _“Sorry, Bàba.”_ The 6 year old mumbles, switching dialects without meaning to. The tight grip crushing his wrist reminded him that it was a mistake, and mistakes had no place here.

“What was that?” Father says in standard, urging him to correct it. Just this once before wrath came down upon him again.

“I’m sorry, father.” He corrects himself, fighting off the bite in his voice. That sated the man’s appetite for violence. The Wutainese man exits the room with the command for the child to have his work finished before he returned, no doubt off to devote his attention to the bottle.

If Yī was lucky, he wouldn’t return at all.

He wasn’t.

His mother always came when Yī began to forget her face for what it was. The child often associated his mother with the drug which had taken her away. With a name like Shine, it was hella ironic that the shine in her eyes had all but gone. Even when she came to him, dressed to the nines and looking healthier than she’d been in months. He’d remember that she was beautiful, even if the addiction took what little she had left.

 _“I’ve come home, Yī. I won’t leave you alone again, we can fix what I broke.”_ She’d tell him, and he’d believe her because she was Māmā and he couldn’t ignore her when she spoke the language he was never allowed to repeat in the earshot of his father. Or when she looked so hopeful and loving, like she had in his dreams. A lonely child craved nothing more than the tenderness of a mother, and she fit the bill when she came to see him. He missed her hugs and her inability to completely assimilate into Midgar (Outside of knowing just enough to get her fix of Shine). It was like she still had a home, even if she wasn’t in the one she had. She left Wutai, but Wutai never left her.

And great fucking Leviathan, it hurt every time she left. She’d always make him his favorite dish the morning before she slipped out of the door, a note left by his bedside with apologies he couldn’t accept. He knew why she left, understood it each time fists drove him deeper and deeper into the floor. With every time he was rendered unable to breathe under sharp kicks and harsh words, he knew why Māmā left and why she never stayed.

She stopped coming home when he was 10.

When Yī was 11, he stopped feeling her absence.

He never knew if that was a good or bad thing. Perhaps it was best he wasn’t reminded of what he didn’t have.

When someone told him how pretty he’d look with long hair, he broke their nose and took their wallet as they curled up on the ground. He didn’t regret it either. Anybody who paid enough attention to how he looked to make that assumption had it coming. He wouldn’t admit it, but when he looked at himself in the mirror later, he found himself agreeing. He wouldn’t look half bad if he skipped a couple haircuts.

Oh well, he still didn’t regret it. He was a growing boy, he needed to eat.

**3.**

Food was hard to come by these days. It became harder as he grew older and less cute. Less people were sympathetic to the lanky preteen with knobby knees and black and blues. It was even harder to eat when he returned home to a house that refused to welcome him. His father either tossed the bottle at him as an acknowledgement of his shameful presence, or he gave him one of the many beatings he received in his lifetime. He was called everything from worthless to a good for nothing waste of space.

He _really_ felt the love.

When he got old enough to couch surf at his friend’s places, he would definitely do that. But unfortunately people didn’t mind their business, and sleeping on the wrong couch for the wrong reasons would get a phone call to the wrong people, who would come and take him from one hell to another.

No thanks.

In the meantime, the streets were the most welcoming place in all of Midgar.  
He took the welcome with wide arms.

**4.**

**1995**

“Yi’s a girl’s name!” His friends teased, evading the kick he lashed out at them with.

“Say that to my face!” The teen snarls with a ferocity that meant wounded pride. He wasn’t a fucking girl! Why did everybody say that?

“Whoa guys--” One of 'em says, her hands raised defensively. She was the peace maker of their little gang. “I think what we’re trying to say is it doesn’t really fit you, y’know? You’re way too tough for a name like that.” It was bullshit and he knew it, but he still fell for it anyway.

A name like Jūn Yǐ in these times wasn’t so good anyway. Told people way too much. It told them he was Wutai blood, and that whoever gave him the name was proud to be that. With the new war on the horizon, he’d be on a lot of people’s shitlists just by existing and being part of the culture that dare resist ShinRa.

“Yeah? Well, I don’t see any of you with any great fuckin’ ideas.” He says with an accent, proud of his inclination toward slum talk. He may have been Wutainese, but he sure didn’t have to speak it or act it.

“It’s your name, you choose it!” Right as one of the older kids said that, the wind picked up, blowing trash their way. For the most part he ignored it, seeing as trash was everywhere here. But something colorful caught his eye this time around.

He kicked the colorful wad of paper, bending down to read it’s contents.

**Visit RENO! You'll have the time of your life, guaranteed!**

It was the most obnoxious, sketchy little thing he’d ever seen in his life.

“Guys... I might have that name after all.” He said with the biggest grin.

It was perfect.

**5.**

His first mistake was agreeing to whatever ritual they wanted to do to christen him with his new name.

His second mistake was not giving the boxes of pomegranate hair dye a second glance when they escaped the store after committing some petty theft as per usual. When he and his crew went down to the basin where water was kept, it was open season on his ass. Reno didn’t see it coming when they tackled him down, dragging him to the edge of where water met stone land dunked his head back, soaking raven locks into the water. One of them sat on his chest to keep him from backing out while the other opened the hair dye bottles. He thrashed and screamed threats for a while before giving up and begrudgingly accepting the fact his hair wasn’t gonna be black by the time everything was said and done. Some goddamn friends. They were all traitors, even their mediator, who stood off to the side gleefully as she watched his hair lighten.

He’d never been baptized before anyway, this was probably as close as he’d get.

But he figured that in order to be reborn, you had to _dye_ first. 

When they finally washed the dye out of his hair and let him up, he punched the boy who sat on him in the gut, just because he could. Before he could give someone else a piece of the action, a large mirror shard was held before his face, the reflection staring back at him a far cry from what he was used to.

Reno looked… Different. The angles in his face more pronounced. It made him look older, sharper.

Sure, he could do with a more even coloring, because the bits of brown and bright red at his roots were an eyesore, but otherwise…

He liked it. He liked it a lot.

With that, the mirror shard was tossed aside as his friends all lifted him into the air, screeching victories that bounced off the top of their own sky of metal. There was a new kid and town, and everybody would know by dawn.

**6.**

Coming home that night was his third mistake.

A fist to the face met him at the door, and it didn’t stop there. Father seized him by the hair, wrapping newly dyed locks around his fist. Growing it out as long as he did seemed to have been an error on his part in hindsight. He could hear the man screaming at him in a language he thought long dead in the house. Words like ‘spawn’ and ‘demon’ were thrown around as he found himself dragged wherever his father wanted him to go. He was more furious than Reno had ever seen him, more furious than he’d been in the nights following Māmā’s departure. He tried to tune it out, tried to tune out the pain and the ache of bruises from days passed.

The flash of steel brought him back to reality. Suddenly he was being hauled up and pushed to the wall, met with an eerie smile as the man who raised him with barely veiled contempt for all that he was pressed the blade to the space where cheekbone met temple.

 **“I’m going to give you a lesson you’ll** **_never_ ** **forget, boy.”**

The crescents carved into his face taught him something alright.

He had no home.

**Author's Note:**

> The other half of this story is written, however I felt that in order to post this and keep it from staying trapped in a google doc forever that it had to be split into parts. Because I still have things to finish and edit/deliberate on. Can't promise you when you'll see the next chapter, but I can promise you it'll be worthwhile.


End file.
